Get a Seat at the Marketing Table: Recruitment Marketing 101

Today, with the rapid advancement in technology, recruiting has become more and more like marketing, and for good reason. However, recruiters don’t often receive the support they need, or desire, from their marketing department to effectively launch recruitment marketing strategies or HR recruitment procedures.

By understanding what recruitment marketing is you can create a robust recruitment process. Plus, in three steps you’ll see how you can gain a seat at the marketing table.

Defining “Recruitment Marketing”

First things first—what is recruitment marketing? Recruitment marketing is the process of using marketing best practices, strategies, and tactics to find, attract, engage, and nurture talent leads, successfully converting them into qualified applicants. This is important because the right hires can’t exist without great applicants and before you can have great applicants you need to have strong leads.

Understanding Recruitment Marketing

On average, companies have spent between 15 and 60 days back-filling a position. That’s a long time. Successful organizations know that to avoid costly and lengthy time-to-fill, a well-thought-out plan for building solid relationships with leads is necessary. Organized talent pools are one way recruiters keep job seekers informed on company information including job alerts and other announcements. As a result, passive talent is nurtured until they’re ready to apply.

Today, recruiters must view the recruitment marketing strategy holistically. Using traditional “nurturing” techniques like automated email to keep prospects “warm” through communication, as well as, newer tactics such as video or social media content to engage and source candidates. A talent CRM, such as iCIMS Connect, allows users to create powerful recruitment marketing campaigns with fully-branded messages. This encourages engagement and helps to build a strong pipeline of warm candidates for future hiring needs.

Overall, today’s consumer-minded candidates are looking for companies that fit their lifestyles and interests. To showcase your company culture and brand, tap into your company’s marketing resources. It’s simple, follow these three steps:

1. Establish Credibility with the Marketing Team

Put time on the calendar to meet for coffee or get lunch with individuals on your marketing team. This will give you the opportunity to learn what they are involved in already, explain what the HR team does exactly, and share that there is an exciting opportunity to partner on initiatives that will help the company grow. If it makes sense, have your team do the same. Once you’ve gained common ground or alignment, perhaps providing ways you’ll help the marketing team hire the next SEO rock-star, then begin to think like a true internal partnership.

2. Partner with the Marketing Team

Discuss what it will take for your potential candidates to receive the best sense of what your company is about. This could involve working together to create highly targeted ads that individuals can click into to view relevant materials. Whatever the decided approach, be sure to have a plan in place to monitor data and analytics, an important step in all marketing strategies. Being able to report on recruiting performance such as time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, and candidate-quality can help you hire better and faster too. With iCIMS applicant tracking system Recruit used in conjunction with iCIMS Connect, users have access to insightful standard and customizable reports that track email campaign effectiveness and provide insight into event success.

Remember, most marketers are professionals at connecting with people in an organic and meaningful way helping companies get the best customers. Therefore, don’t be afraid to discuss other options for attracting the best candidates.

3. Make a Business Case for Recruitment Marketing Tools

Eighty-four percent of companies agree that recruitment marketing is a worthwhile investment, but your recruiters are only as good as the technology that allows them to do their job and compete in the war for talent. Did you know that the average business uses 77 applications for HR and 97 percent of them are not well-integrated?Does your executive team know this? Advocate for recruitment marketing tools to live within one talent acquisition platform empowering your recruiters with centralized communication, candidate lifecycle trackability, and streamlined steps in recruitment and selection, in addition to, new hire policy and procedures. Investing in best-of-breed talent acquisition technology with robust recruitment marketing tools is key to success and profitability. By working closely with your marketing team, your case can be validated for such technology to improve the company’s hiring efficiency and success.

The recruitment industry has changed, but so have you, your mindset, and technology. Take your seat at the marketing table as an integral partner and see how successful your recruitment marketing strategies can be!